Human parents want their children to look up to them. They think they deserve to be loved. That includes being respected and obeyed. Why? Because it is an expectation that comes naturally to them. After all, they’re the ones who gave life to their offspring.

That also puts them in an authoritative, responsible position of having to teach life and help form character. As such, they accept their roles and instruct and invite their little ones to first turn to them to have their needs fulfilled.

In the same way, God views Himself in His relationship with us. But being God, whose ways and thoughts are so much higher than ours, what He desires and is deserving of, is on a higher level.

He desires us to worship Him with a life full of love that respects, reveres, adores, praises, obeys, emulates, is holy, and that gives thanks and glory to Him. It is a natural expectation on His part that we would sense that living in such a way would benefit us.

God doesn’t need worship, and especially in a vainglorious sense. He is complete within Himself. He desires worship for our sake. At the time He conceived us in His mind, He saw that it was worship that would guide us. To worship Him, He realized, is for us to have what He has—an everlasting life of righteousness.

Because He is the definition and origin of life itself; and because He is able to give unending life comprised of ultimate truth concerning all things created, uncreated, and about Himself, He factually knows that He is deserving of worship—again, not in a prideful, self-serving, pump Himself up way, but in the sense that we would be helped.

God knows who He is and what He stands for. Consequently, He knows that it is because of His existence that we have the opportunity to grow into well-rounded, mature, righteous beings. He saw this from eternity past; that worship would be what it will take to have us reach the eternal destiny He wants for all of us.

He knows that He is the ultimate source from which we must depend on for holy growth. That cannot be altered. It is what it is. Therefore, when God tells us to worship Him, it is so that our dependence on Him is fulfilled. Worship, it was seen, would be instructional and molding.

In that way, the Life that we worship will naturally grow us into His eternal life’s thoughts and ways.